Intel talks dedicated media accelerators in Sandy Bridge

With the launch of Intelâ€™s Sandy Bridge processors drawing closer, weâ€™re starting to see more and more bits of information make their way online. Yesterday we got a glimpse at four laptop models expected to feature the new silicon early January, and now CNet brings us some fresh information about the chipâ€™s media playback abilities. Specifically, it confirmed Sandy Bridge would include dedicated media acceleration circuitry with support for DirectX 10.1 and OpenCL 1.1.

Well, to be blunt, these IGPs are really more of a stop-gap, just as previous IGPs from Intel have been. They give better efficiencies and some graphics capabilities to the laptops they are in, but those laptops are never "gaming quality" machines. This is a step up from what Intel offered previously, but for their target audience the difference between DX10.1 and DX11 would never be noticed. Any gamer looking at a laptop would go for a discrete mobile GPU, at least for the near future. As the newer generation APUs get better, and graphics processing more efficient, that may change slowly.